Wires find path of least resistance: Better superconducting strips hold hope for a perfect national grid. Quote: "Twenty years ago this month, two researchers discovered a class of materials that sparked dreams of electricity grids that would transmit power without any losses and trains that would levitate along friction-free tracks. Researchers now think they have overcome one of the key obstacles that has stopped these visions becoming a reality. They have shown how to fashion the high-temperature superconductors discovered in 1986 into the wires and cables that engineers need."Link

Lesley Chamberlain is the author of Motherland, a book about the history of Russian philosophy from the 19th century onwards, and has another book on the subject coming out soon. Rick Lewis asked her about her books and about Russia’s philosophical past.Link

IBM Scientists Develop New Way To Explore And Control Atom-scale Magnetism: IBM scientists have developed a powerful new technique for exploring and controlling magnetism at its fundamental atomic level.Link

Vienna (OTS) – As announced at the press conference in Berlin's Café Einstein, the Vienna group monochrom has assumed ownership of all trademark and usage rights of the artist Jörg Schlick's "Lord Jim Lodge". Schlick, who died in December 2005, developed the brand name together with Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Wolfgang Bauer during the 1980s. This takeover has far-reaching consequences for numerous artistic endeavors. In cooperation with the Berlin art consulting agency Teyssandier-Springer, monochrom has lodged claims asserting its rights in the affair while simultaneously inviting the owners of the works in question to negotiate a satisfactory out-of-court settlement.

Shortly before the artist's death, monochrom purchased from Jörg Schlick in a package deal all rights pertaining to intellectual property, copyright, trademark, and usage in accordance with national and international regulations.

Furthermore, additional agreements were made devolving to monochrom any and every legal claim pertaining to resale rights involving the artwork "Lord Jim Lodge".

In practical terms this means: without the agreement of the owners of the trademarks specified above, those works that contain these trademarks may not be used in any way. This applies first and foremost to reproduction and exhibition.

Legal action is being considered against galleries such as the NGBK in Berlin, Galerie Bleich-Rossi in Vienna and the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, which in view of planned upcoming exhibitions run in danger of infringing on these rights.

This approach is intended to create a foundation for franchising concepts and artistic "restartups". Thus, in cooperation with Teyssandier-Springer, monochrom is investigating the acquisition of additional trademarks with a high symbolic value but low real capital volume. Netbase (Institute for New Cultural Technologies, Vienna) and the artist group ubermorgen.com (Prix Ars Electronica 2005) have been named as potential precarized candidates for acquisition.

Brain Cells Fused with Computer Chip: The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons. To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size. They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive. (Thanx, Carlos Katastrofsky!)Link

Mapping the E-Mail Deliverability Chain: Quote: "Years ago, the e-mail delivery chain had just a few links. You loaded your e-mail and hit "send." After a couple handoffs, the message arrived in your recipient's inbox the way you sent it. Today, that chain has many more links. Some block your e-mail, others help it along. Deliverability has become a big issue for many e-mail senders. It even spawned this column." (thanx, eSel)Link

Tunisia: independent but not free: Tunisia celebrates the 50th anniversary of independence this month, but hopes raised by the end of French rule and early reforms have long evaporated. The country is governed and owned by General Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. But opposition groups have begun to suppress their divisions and make an attempt at collective resistance.Link

The Woman With The Perfect Memory: A woman named AJ remembers everything that ever happened to her. Everything. "Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date."Link

monochrom accident // monochrom member Franky Ablinger in Cheat Death Mode: The glass door at monochrom office (Museumsquartier Vienna) crashed on the head of monochrom member Franky Ablinger and shattered. Eyewitness pictures: Martin Markeli.

Crime in Robotic State: A police officer in Ottawa claimed to be in a "Robot-like-state". The state "caused by post-traumatic stress disorder when he snatched a batch of groceries including 5 candy bars."Link

"Basically everyone shows up near the art gallery around 3, suddenly whips out their pillows, has at it with anyone else who has an overstuffed pillow, and then covertly slips back into the woodwork at 3:15, letting the feathers fall where they may. The only rules are not to hit anyone without a pillow unless they're asking for it, and not to hit anyone with a camera. "Link and Link

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sends first snaps home: The most powerful camera ever sent into space has relayed its first batch of detailed test images of the Red Planet – the mission scientists are delighted.Link

Laptop Virtuosos: An Orchestra Of Laptops: The Princeton Laptop Orchestra, founded last fall, can, with "15 first-year students on Macs connected to custom omnidirectional speakers" emulate a full-fledged orchestra. "Or an electronica band. Or a jazz combo. It's easy when the conductor keeps time via network clocks precise to 20 milliseconds."Link

The Labyrinth of Kinship: Jack Goody reviews Maurice Godelier's book "Métamorphoses de la parenté". Quote: "This is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Lévi-Strauss’s Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) or Meyer Fortes’s Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier's summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest. Kinship has the reputation of being the most technical department of anthropology, the least accessible to a general public. But while Métamorphoses synthesizes a huge range of complex materials, it is written in an unfailingly lucid style that makes no assumptions of professional familiarity with terms and debates about kinship, but always takes care to explain them in language anyone can understand. The book is both a monument of scholarship and a gripping set of reflections on universal experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come."Link

Saudi Arabia: The Sands Run Out: Quote: "Last month's foiled attack on a Saudi Arabian oil installation demonstrated yet again the world’s extreme vulnerability to any check on oil supplies. But what if the Saudi oilfields are running lower on untapped supplies than the kingdom, and the West, have estimated? As concern rises in the United States and elsewhere over the future availability of oil, the global community of energy experts has split into two camps: the optimists believe that oil is abundant and will remain so for years to come, while the pessimists think supplies will become increasingly scarce. For both, Saudi Arabia, the world's leading oil producer, has a pivotal role. The optimists believe that it will continue to expand its output, thereby satisfying ever-increasing global demand; the pessimists contend that its oilfields will soon decline, eliminating any prospect of expanding the world's net oil supply. To reach any conclusions about world supply, we must first consider Saudi Arabia."Link

Statistical Analysis Bolsters Theory Linking Warmer Oceans to Stronger Hurricanes: Since the 1970s, ocean surface temperatures around the globe have been on the rise--from one half to one degree Fahrenheit, depending on the region. Last summer, two studies linked this temperature rise to stronger and more frequent hurricanes. Skeptics called other factors into account, such as natural variability, but a new statistical analysis shows that only this sea surface temperature increase explains this trend.Link

Mermaid Case? Harare, Zimbabwe. A bogus traditional healer who persuaded a businesswoman to hire "mermaids" and accommodate them in a Harare hotel to help find a stolen car was convicted of theft by false pretenses, court officials said Tuesday.Link

LED Throwies: LED Throwies are an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. Throw it up high and in quantity to impress your friends and city officials (thanx, ren!).

Scientists find another key to HIV success: Weill Cornell Medical College scientists say they've determined a protein produced by HIV infected cells prevents immune B cells from producing antibodies. The finding, say the researchers, could alter the way experts view HIV, helping to explain how the virus evades the immune system during the first days and weeks of infection. It also helps unravel a paradox in HIV treatment: The fact that patients can have high blood levels of immune T cells and yet still be vulnerable to the virus.Link

Is it time to rethink our perceptions of urban sprawl? Quote: "Does sprawl include exurbia, the outmost band of development, ... the very low-density urban penumbra that lies beyond the regularly built-up suburbs and their urban services? Or is it the newly emerging suburban band of conventional subdivisions, golf courses, schools, and strip malls located closer in toward the city? If the latter is sprawl, is it logical to exclude older suburbs? Certainly at one time these older communities, even many of the most densely packed inner neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan, were themselves relatively low in density and suburban in character compared to what was the core of the city. Why wouldn't they be considered historic sprawl?"Link

BloodViolet: Perfect Evolution (and the Buried Soul): What this year's four vampire-hybrid films have in common is an overcoming of our oldest fear.

Quote: >>Pop quiz: Which 2006 film depicts a sexy vampire, skilled at swordplay, gunplay, and/or martial arts, stuck in the middle of a war over half-vampire hybrids? Trick question - four films this year do: in order of their release, BloodRayne, Underworld: Evolution, UltraViolet, and, coming at the end of the year, Perfect Creature. The vampire novels of Anne Rice and the comic-book-inspired Blade movies were no doubt big motivators for creating the current crop - but the particular emphasis all four of the movies place on hybrids- and the possibility of war over genetic purity - suggests that something more than old-fashioned vampirism makes these films resonate with early-twenty-first-century audiences - or rather with the producers who green-lit the projects. In a culture increasingly defined by our ability to mix and match at will - blending pirated elements of old songs to create "mash-ups," blending DNA from different plants and animals, blending elements of various subcultures, eras, and ethnic groups - vampires have clearly ceased to be villains and have become one more exciting style to adopt. Sure, dressing like a vampire is fun for the goths, and rooting for vampires (they kill people, but they have such lovely angst) is a blast for Rice fans - but a true mix-and-match era should hold out the promise of actually being a vampire.<<Link

What 'They' Don't Want You to Know: An Analysis of Kevin Trudeau's Natural Cures Infomercial: Kevin Trudeau's book, Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About, has spent months on the best-seller lists and has been heavily promoted in Trudeau's ubiquitous infomercials. But just what is Trudeau's rhetoric, and how accurate are his claims?Link

"Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief" by Lewis Wolpert. Reviewed by John Carey.Quote: >>Neuroscience reveals that belief and logic activate different parts of the brain, and where belief and logic clash, humans will almost always opt for belief, sticking to it obstinately despite adverse evidence. Students offered alternative sets of statistics will choose the one that confirms their prejudices, and a dogged reliance on existing beliefs shows up emphatically in matters affecting health. The belief that vitamin supplements provide a defence against illness, and that "natural" products are not harmful, is widespread even among educated people. Wolpert does not condemn such superstitions, for beliefs, it seems, can keep you healthy, whether they are valid or not. Experiment shows that all sorts of pain can be relieved with a sugar-pill placebo, provided the patient believes in its curative powers. Credulity may ensure survival better than logic.The same applies with religious beliefs. Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life's problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes. Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy. Mystical raptures, similar to those reported by the devout, can be produced, he points out, by mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs and this, too, indicates that religion depends on neural circuits in our brain that accident or malfunction can activate. Some neuroscientists now link spiritual experiences with specific brain areas. Stimulating the brain of subjects with electromagnets causes tiny seizures in the temporal lobes that induce the subjects to believe they have spiritual experiences. The visions of St Teresa, it is suggested, may have been symptoms of temporal-lobe epilepsy.<<Link

Einstein Effect Reveals Icy Exoplanet: An international team of scientists has discovered a massive new planet thanks to a phenomenon predicted by Einstein 70 years ago. Microlensing occurs when a star crosses in front of another star and bends the light from the more distant star, magnifying it like a lens. Astronomers recently took advantage of one such occlusion to get a better look at a red dwarf star roughly 9,000 light years from Earth, known as BLG-169. It appeared even brighter than expected. Only a star with a planet could have produced this effect, they say.Link

Live remix machine with human beatbox interface:Scrambled Hackz is an extraordinary piece of software which analyses any audio input (particularly singing or human beatboxing), and crudely recreates it using clips from another piece of music (it uses videos as a source, so the video clips are remixed at the same time). It's like an instant live remix, with a microphone as an interface. It's hard to explain, but creator Sven König does it very well in this splendid promotional video (unfortunately a rather slow download). Sven has used the software as an instrument for live performance, but also as a very funny art installation, which lets people sing into a microphone and watch their singing recreated (sort of) by MC Hammer. The software itself isn't yet available for download, but will be soon. (Thanks, Marcus and Jörg)

Cave of Leader: The communist Pathet Lao leadership spent nine fugitive years under relentless American bombing. One vast cavern, once the haunt of wild elephants, was converted into a lecture hall; in 1971 a deputation from Cuba, bearing a large framed portrait of Che Guevara, was received there by an audience of five thousand.Link

Quote: >>It has been said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Indeed, humankind's endeavors to document the past for the sake of educating future generations are one of the species distinguishing features. Examples are myriad, ranging from primitive cave paintings, hieroglyphics, epic poems, monuments, on through our more modern documentaries and national holidays. Enter into this list Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Produced by Steven Spielberg, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and written by Jeffrey Price and William S. Seamen, the popular children’s movie combines live action with animation in order to tell the story of a 'toon wrongfully accused of murdering a human. Beneath the film's "loony" plot and glossy, Technicolor veneer exists a cleverly wrought allegory on the Holocaust that will help to perpetuate the important lessons of that terrible atrocity for audiences old and new.<<Link

Latin America's Leftist Shift: Hopes and Challenges: Within the last six years in Latin America numerous social movements have gained momentum in the fight for human rights, better living and working conditions and an end to corporate exploitation and military violence. Recently, left of center leaders have been elected in Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile and Venezuela. These political leaders, whose victory in office is due largely to these social movements in the streets, have pledged to fight poverty and prioritize the needs of the people over the interests of Washington and international corporations. This resistance is connected to centuries of organizing among indigenous groups and unions in Latin America. I'd like to discuss some reasons why this leftist shift is happening right now and about a few key moments and events in this movement's recent history. Latin America is currently waking up from a decades-long nightmare brought on by military dictatorships which came to power throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, including Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Jorge Videla in Argentina and General Rios Montt in Guatemala among others.Link

Astronomers Detect First Split-Second of the Universe: Scientists announced today new evidence supporting the theory that the infant universe expanded from subatomic to astronomical size in a fraction of a second after its birth.Link

Piracy Crackdown: Quote: "Twenty-nine people have been arrested [in the UK] in the biggest ever operation against those who make and sell counterfeit CDs, DVDs and computer games. A six-month investigation has seen representatives from the record, film and software industries working with police and trading standards officers... They were also targeting those committing benefit fraud, reflecting the growing increase in the level of cooperation between the government and the so-called 'creative' industries."Link

Researchers discover new microbial life in the Mediterranean: Researchers from the University of Essex have discovered a deep-sea oasis with new microbial life forms that could have significant implications for biotechnology. The findings have been published this week in the journal Nature.Link

New Class Of Compounds Promise Better Drugs, Clean Energy: By combining a common organic compound with a rare metal, a team of Brown University chemists has created a new class of molecules that have potentially important applications for the pharmaceutical, chemical and energy industries.Link

Separation of Man and Ape Down to Gene Expression: Humans and chimpanzees have in common more than 98 percent of DNA and 99 percent of genes. Yet, in looks and behavior we are very different from them. For more than 30 years--well before either the human or chimpanzee genome had been sequenced--scientists have speculated that this might be due to the way that the common genes express themselves rather than differences in the genes themselves. A new comparison published in Nature seems to prove that theory.Link

UNT professor, students believe contact with dead can aid healing: University of North Texas tenured professor Jan Holden and her graduate students believe that ghosts don't haunt, they heal. Quote: "There is just no basis to say this is not a legitimate area of research. Thousands of people have had after-death communications, and probably what's most hurtful is a culture that doesn't prepare people for these experiences. I have no reason not to believe it's real."Link

The Bread of Conquest: The agony and the ecstasy are intertwined in California's countryside. Artichokes, freestone peaches, and Gravenstein apples are but a few of the vast number of crops grown in the Golden State, which were it a country, would be the sixth leading agricultural exporter in the world. For the workers whose hands create wealth out of nature, the agony has been ever-present, from the bloody repression of the 1913 Wobbly-led Wheatland hop pickers strike to the recent attempt by Southern California grocery workers to hold onto their health care and pensions.Link

The Great Battle Of The DVDs: Quote: "A new war has broken out as two new generations of DVD players hit stores this year. Both are targeting owners of high-definition televisions, promising to maximize their set's capacity for razor-sharp images. One is called HD-DVD. The other is called Blu-ray. North America gets its first real look at Sony's Blu-ray player in Las Vegas this week, with the new format hitting stores May 23. HD-DVD players go on sale at the end of this month. And soon stores will stock movies on DVD specifically formatted for one player or the other."Link

Robotic NASA Craft Begins Orbiting Mars For Most-Detailed Exam: With a crucially timed firing of its main engines today, NASA's new mission to Mars successfully put itself into orbit around the red planet.Link

View of Easter Island Disaster All Wrong, Researchers Say: The first settlers on Easter Island didn't arrive until 1200 AD, up to 800 years later than previously thought, a new study suggests. If correct, the finding would mean that the island's irreversible deforestation and construction of its famous Moai statues began almost immediately after Polynesian settlers first set foot on the island.Link

An Oscars For Video Games: Quote: >>The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced that video games are as important to popular culture as film and television. As a result, what it regards as "one of the principal contemporary art forms" will be rewarded with a beefed-up British Academy video games awards in October.<<Link

Life in a strong hold of the "Bolivarian Revolution": Rito Martinez a former guerilla fighter with flowing white hair and a long white beard stands in the town square of Sanare, a small mountain village. Sanare is located in the state of Lara, a state which lies roughly 200 miles southwest of Caracas, Venezuela's capital. Inspired by the revolution in Cuba Martinez along with thousands of other fighters in the 1960s took to the surrounding mountainside. In response the Venezuelan government pursued these fighters imprisoning or "disappearing" thousands of guerillas and their sympathizers. For 9 years Martinez was held captive in what he describes as "a rodent infested tunnel with prison cages." Today the sons and daughters of Martinez's generation carry forth their left wing legacy and earn Lara the reputation of being called the 'most revolutionary state in the country.'Link

How To Grow A Bigger Brain: Hatchery-reared steelhead trout show increased growth of some parts of the brain when small stones are scattered on the bottom of their tank, according to a new study by researchers at UC Davis. The brains of those young fish were closer to those of salmon reared in the wild, and the fish also showed behavior closer to wild than to hatchery-reared fish.

Hollywood Hates Your Homebrew PVR: Quote: >>Ever since TiVo took over the American television landscape, there has been an explosion of homemade versions of the personal video recorder that do most of the same things TiVo can do, but cheaper, and without a monthly subscription. However, a new round of "digital rights management" legislation threatens to make all but the "official" recorders obsolete, and Hollywood is pushing hard for passage.<<Link

Psychopathic Robots Predicted: Rodrick Wallace of the New York Psychiatric Institute has released a draft version of a new paper (PDF format) in which he speculates on the mathematical foundations of machine intelligence and the difficulty of controlling the development of a complex, conscious machine. Even if such a machine could be created in an initially stable state, Wallace believes it likely that the machine would become psychotic. "The most likely use of the first generations of conscious machines will be to model the various forms of psychopathology, since we have little or no understanding of how consciousness is stabilized in humans or other animals." Last year we mentioned another paper by Wallace in which he predicted that biomimetic machines were likely to "fail insidiously, irregularly, and progressively" for similar mathematical reasons (thanks, Magnus Wurzer).Link

Vulva Original: The perfume with the "authentically natural vaginal flavour".

"VULVA Original lets you enjoy the scent of a woman anytime you want. It's easy to use: shake the VULVA vial well, and the fluid is also transformed to optically resemble the object of every man's desire."Link (In English and German)

Transgendered Lobster Caught Near Maine: "I was looking at the colors of its shell and turned it over and thought, that's not right."

An article about this mutant lobster in a local newspaper, the Ellsworth American, misidentified the animal as a hermaphrodite. A hermaphrodite either switches genders during a lifestyle change or has complete sets of both male and female genitalia. What this extraordinary lobster is experiencing is a condition known as gynandromorphy, in which the animal was accidently built with parts of both male and female plumbing.Link

Nice new entries! Backbround story: "One day in Autumn of 2004 I found a heap of old cardboard boxes and other discarded packaging material in my grandfather's shed. Among it was a box for a chainsaw. On the back of it there was this peculiar sequence of drawings in black and white. I looked at it for a while but to be honest, I couldn't make any sense of it. Commissioned art printed on the back of the box for chainsaws, only to be discarded, never to be seen by anyone else again. And there I was, looking at these pictures on a cold day in October. The pictures began to whisper to me. Little tales of love and sorrow, hate and terror, big ideas and small hopes. Man creates universes, first with his thoughts, then with with his words. That is why this very webpage exists. I want to fill this hollow space of empty pictorials with your words, the words of the graphic novel. Help me bring the stories in the drawing come to life, there's a hell of a lot of them in there. Now, you write one, too."Link

Animal brain pics: Quote: "Take a close look at all these brains. Are they what you expected to see? What kinds of perceptions do you have about brain structure, brain sizes, the relationship between brains and complex behavior?"Link

Red Rain Could Prove That Aliens Have Landed: There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. Does it contain alien life, or, as one scientist describes it, bullshit?Link

The Shakespeare Industry At Full Roar: The who-was-Shakespeare industry is currently in full gear. >>Last year saw no fewer than three hefty biographies, distilled from the slim documentary record of Shakespeare’s existence and coloured up into portraits through socio-historical detail and complex deductions from the plays and poems. Soon the Royal Shakespeare Company will launch a multinational season of the "Complete Works" at Stratford-upon-Avon, with 41 full-scale productions. And now we have the National Portrait Gallery’s Searching for Shakespeare, an exhibition centring on eight pictures that have at one time or another been accepted as true images of the Bard.<<Link

Woman's Consciousness, Man's World: From Z Classics: "The capitalist mode of production has penetrated farther and deeper than any other form of production. Geographically it has extended its technology in search of markets; politically it has devised the most ingenious methods of control in its own interests; economically it has created means of production, which are wonderful in their productive capacity and terrifying in their devastation."Link

Physicist's Algorithm Simplifies Biological Imaging -- And Also Solves Sudoku Puzzles: Cornell physicist Veit Elser has been engrossed recently in resolving a pivotal question in biological imaging. So he hasn't had much time for brainteasers and number games.Link

Studies Show Chimps to Be Collaborative and Altruistic: In the wild, chimpanzees have been known to hunt together, particularly when conditions dictate that a solo hunter will not be successful. Yet this does not prove that our nearest living relatives understand cooperation the same way that we do: such group hunts may simply be the product of independent and simultaneous actions by many individuals with little comprehension of the need for coordinated action to ensure success. A new study, however, shows for the first time that chimpanzees understand when cooperation is needed and how to go about securing it effectively. And another study shows they might even be willing to cooperate without hope of reward.Link

Shakespeare Died Of Cancer? Quote: "William Shakespeare died in pain of a rare form of cancer that deformed his left eye, according to a German academic who claims to have discovered the disease in four genuine portraits of the world's most famous playwright."Link

monochrom podcast // monochrom – children of postmodernism: Quote: >>Interview with Johannes Grenzfurthner from the Austrian artgroup monochrom. The monochrom group are the funniest artists I have met for a long time. [...] Johannes and I would like to make our excuses to English native speakers. This is not pretty - ABER ES IST GREAT FUN.<<Link

monochrom gala show "No Power For Theory And/Or Practise" at Cyberpipe, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

monochrom’s Cyberpipe medley is a tour-de-farce diversion intended to hold the attention of the Cyberpipe audience. A joyful bucket full of good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair, condensed into the well known cultural technique of a gala show. Powernapping highly welcome.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: Fear of a Vegan World. It's just not natural...

Quote: >>So Park’s Curse of the Were Rabbit is born from and reflects the anxiety of a steak lover in an increasingly vegetarian society. This anxiety is hardly surprising. The more we learn about meats the more we fear them: mad cow disease, hormone injections, methane pollution from cattle causing lung problems and contributing to global warming, unsanitary living conditions for livestock, bird flu, high cholesterol, obesity, and a host of other fears and guilts all contribute to anxiety about meat. But our anxiety about meat goes beyond mere health concerns. For us to eat a cow, someone needs to kill a cow. Every slice of meat, therefore, symbolizes residual societal violence, and societally—at least in the West, it would seem—our values are slowly moving toward non-violence. Our hunger for meat is a sign of our aggression or a remnant of the aggression of our forefathers. We distance ourselves by hiring people to do our killing for us, but the killing is still there and we know it. People do our killing for us at the deli and in wartime. Most of us never know the real cost of eating a steak or waging a war.<<Link

Do you take it? A wonderful swing musicalette about dating and anal intercourse... brought to you by Kirby Ferguson and The Wet Spots. Quote: "You're beautiful and curvy, but unless you're kinda pervy, there's no way you and me are going to last..."

If this Space is For Rent, Who Will Move In? From Modernist to Postmodernist Forms of Criticism -- Criticism as Art or Advertisement? Quote: >>Writing years in advance of television and the internet, Walter Benjamin's vision of the future places the new sensibility created by mechanical reproduction at the forefront of modernity. The most important aspect of this sensibility is the radical immediacy it lodges into the heart of modern life. Benjamin understood, quite clearly, that all aspects of life would be affected by this immediacy in a way quite similar to Karl Marx's vision of capitalism in terms of an ecological (read: total) change of society. The danger of such a change, as Benjamin and Marx understood it (both understood capitalism as creating social and cognitive changes), was the threat of homogenization and mindless consumerism. Indeed, Benjamin's colleague at the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, believed the "culture industry" turned everyone into consumers and foreclosed the possibility of thought and heterogeneity.[2] Benjamin took a much different approach, instructive for us in our post 9/11 crisis culture wherein homogeneity is circulated by reducing the world to a Manichean struggle between democracy and terror. He argued that, rather than taking a position that merely reacts to the media, intellectuals should imitate it and use its strengths in the name of revolution and heterogeneity. For this reason, he argued that criticism should incorporate aspects of film and, strangely enough, the most open media expression of capitalism: the advertisement.<<Link

Spelling problems with his pasport: Quote: >>You might have the best forgery skills in the world, but it is not much use if you cannot spell. A Cyprus court jailed Pakistani national Fazal Ur Rehman for eight months for forgery after police spotted spelling mistakes on stamps on an Afghan passport he was carrying -- otherwise it was a near-perfect copy, the Cyprus Mail said Wednesday. "Ministry" was spelled "Menistry" and the first "n" was missing from government, the newspaper said. "The passport looked perfect and professionally made ... almost deemed original by forensics," a police officer told a magistrate in the Cypriot capital Nicosia.<<Link

Cannibal Crickets Cause "Forced Marches" Through Crops: Why do crop-eating bugs like Mormon crickets cover so much ground so quickly? Stephen Simpson, entomologist: "They have an incentive to move, because they're least at risk of being cannibalized if they're going in the same direction as everybody else."Link

For musicians, an online alternative: Quote: "The clash between a musician's creative impulses and the commercial imperatives that drive record companies is as old as recorded sound itself. Artists make the music and labels sell it, promoting and marketing it to the masses and reaping the lion's share of the profits." One Boston entrepreneur is hoping to change that model, offering a new service which allows musicians to make their songs available on iTunes and other online services while retaining copyright control.Link

monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.[more]